player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

[cozen]

WHO: Anyone who didn't die here.
WHAT: A sad week.
WHEN: Approx Solas 21-30
WHERE: Granitefell, the Gallows, wherever else you want.
NOTES: A second log for this plot. Additional posts/logs will cover the time travel/fix-it components—this one is for the time period where no one knows that's a possibility.

Those who fly out to Granitefell arrive a few hours after dawn to find a smoldering gravesite and fewer than twenty living souls, Riftwatch's five included. The survivors have done what they can in the intervening hours, but there's still work to be done to tend to wounds, move the bodies—especially the delicate ones—and help the remaining villagers, mostly children, build pyres to see to their own dead before they're relocated somewhere safer. Somewhere with roofs that aren't collapsed or still lightly burning.

Carts to carry Riftwatch's dead won't arrive for some time afterward, and bringing them back takes just as long. It's a few days before they're returned to the Gallows, preserved from decay as best everyone could manage but nonetheless in poor shape from the battle. Pyres are an Andrastian tradition for a reason—to prevent possession—but burials and mummification aren't so unheard of that anyone will be barred from seeing to their loved ones as they see fit.

Before, during, and after any funerary rites, there are absences. Empty beds, empty offices, voices missing from the crystals, pancakes missing from Sundays. Belongings that need to be sorted and letters that need to be written. And, perhaps most pressingly, work that still needs to be done, including the work left behind by those who can no longer follow through on their own projects or tie up their own loose ends, as the world and its war keep moving steadily onward as if nothing happened at all.

Comments

[hassaran]

She continues to frown but she follows without repeating the question, shifting the lay of the strap on her shoulder while shooting a look back over it and, as if finding no objection from the bodies across the water, trudging after him.

The chapel is dimly candlelit, the damp cool of an underground place, and all but empty. The lay sister who comes in once a week or so to tend the candles and chant services (mostly for the staff) has come, and the way she fusses around the altar, hands flapping, conspicuously not looking directly at them, makes Yseult wonder if the news of two wagons full of bodies has traveled faster through the city than the wagons themselves. Or maybe she's just afraid of Flint.

She picks a pew, sinks to a seat with a strained version of her usual grace, folds her hands together on her knees and looks at him, waiting.

[katabasis]

When he slides into the pew and sits beside her, he means to produce the envelope tucked in the interior pocket of his coat. There is so much work to be done and so few hours in which to it; they will have to find a new head for Diplomacy. That person will need a strategy to find them replacements.

Instead—

A heavy breath out through the nose, not a sigh but very like one. He is tired. These past days, he keeps looking up and being startled by the quality of the daylight either because too much time has slipped past or not enough has. And here, she is waiting on him and all he has to give her are fucking sheafs of paper.

(The lay sister rearranges a few candlesticks. Makes to smooth the cloth runner beneath them, erasing wrinkles with a heroic single mindedness.)

"I'm sorry all this fell to you."

[hassaran]

She nods. She'd considered, watching the belated reinforcements arrive, whether it would be better or worse to be them. Is it worse to have seen it, or only to hear about it? She can't remember what it felt like to learn of the last massacre--the one that wasn't, really--on the crystals.

And on the other hand--. She shrugs, shoulders lifted high enough for him to see before they're dropped. "Better me than some." If she's thinking of anyone in particular, she's not quite prepared to make the joke yet.

"And the others were helpful. Julius handling the announcement."

[katabasis]

Flint's hums a low note of acknowledgement. There is space here which might be reserved for some unspoken backhanded complimentary remark about the capacity of Riftwatch's average member to screw their head on in the correct direction so long as an actual crisis is looming, but it goes unutilized.

As maybe what he'd really meant to say was—

"I'm sorry about Darras."

[hassaran]

Yseult nods again. It's a phrase she's going to have to get used to hearing. And then, once the handful of people here who even know his name have finished saying it, she'll have to get used to that, too—that he'll probably never be spoken of again in her hearing.

She shrugs again and as it drops her weight gradually shifts onto her forearms, back bending, shoulders rising to meet her ears. Lips purse and are sucked back in, tugged by teeth back into a grim line. She nods again, and her head keeps bobbing as it drops into her hands. She stays that way for a moment, back expanding with a deep breath, and then drags hands down her face and back together, back to hanging off her knees. Nods again.

"Yeah. Sorry about Silver."

[katabasis]

Sat there beside, both watching and not watching the brief crumpling in the lines of her, he has laid one of his hands over the other and begun to absently turn the rings on his fingers. Here, the flat stamped gold square rotating about his pinky, and there the silver band with its red aventurine, both turned in meditative succession.

He doesn't sit well; the impulse to be using his hands itches up from deep under the skin.

At mention of Silver, his eyeline slides from her to the front of the chapel. Some muscle in his cheek works, producing a narrowing squint as his chin dips briefly toward his chest. And then gives. He makes himself stop twisting the rings on his hand, moving instead to dig with thumb and forefinger into the meat of his hand where some sinew is tight and could use the encouragement to come unclenched.

"We disliked one another," he says. Tips his head, explanatory— "Initially."

Clearly that changed.

[hassaran]

She thinks I liked him immediately, but she isn't thinking about Silver. The sister is still fiddling around up at the front of the chapel, dusting and straightening, agonizing over trimming a wick, conspicuously ignoring them. Yseult watches her idly, still leaned onto elbows, all that regal presence folding down into something wiry and compact. Did she seem this small when Flint carried her off the field at Ghislain?

"How long ago did you meet?" she asks. She finds, remarkably, that she's actually curious.

[katabasis]

"A year before our arrival here, give or take. He stole something from me and talked his way out of being murdered for it." Narrowly, seems to be implied in the sidelong look that flickers out in Yseult's direction, and in the faint turn of Flint's hand. These things happen in places like Nascere, and presumably Estwatch, and even little islands at the mouth of Kirkwall harbor.

Odd pairs.

(He forgets, often, how young she is. Not that she looks it in this moment either, tired to the point of haggard. She makes it easy to forget, and maybe that's on purpose, or maybe it's some trick or the eye, or habit, or his own expectation or sense of familiarity demanding it be so.)

"I'm surprised," he says, which is funny and not funny all together, bitterly true and stupidly inevitable—a knot somewhere behind the ribs rather than in the throat that he keeps waiting to come unwound into more identifiable segments. Maybe if there weren't a Chantry sister carefully turning her back to them, or maybe if there were less to do, it might all slip apart for easy sorting.

"I was beginning to be convinced that he might have some preternatural knack for squirming out from between the teeth of things ready to kill him."

[hassaran]

There's surprise in the twitch of her brows for that answer, not even the meat of it, but just the timing. They'd arrived already with the air of long and dedicated partnership, she'd have wagered nearer a decade at least. She tries to imagine this inauspicious first meeting, to fit the serious, thoughtful Master of Information into a pattering thief.

"When they were all lost in the desert and we thought they were dead. Was Silver with that group?" she thinks so, but her memory of that is as blurred as this will no doubt be soon, minus the happy ending. "I never really worried about him before then. Or after, except for a few minutes at Val Chevin." She means Darras now, and maybe that's clear somehow in her tone, some unavoidable warmth no one else she talks about ever merits.

She presses palms together, leans her face against the side of them. "It doesn't seem real. I saw them," she adds like a clarification, "Both of them. All of them. Even so."

[katabasis]

Even so.

"I haven't written to his wife yet," is agreement. It has felt premature, somehow; as if there were any doubt whatsoever. A dozen false starts before laying down the pen and resolving to simply see things in the Gallows made ready first. It's not as if a few weeks will make much difference when it comes to the passage of a letter carried by a secret hand, and by the time all was settled here he might be able to offer her a more substantial form of clarity.

(There is work left to do; one man's death doesn't alter that. There is a way forward from this, if he only can trick himself into focusing on the question of what that looks like instead of staring over his shoulder.)

At the head of the chapel, the Chantry Sister bends to fetches an oil jug up from the stone floor with a soft rasp. Presumably the brazier with Andraste's little flame has already been tended to for she bundles the jug in her arms, sweeps an apologetic and unseeing look across the nave, and then prudently steps to the margins of the pews before hurrying along the margins of the little chapel with her head studiously bowed and eye eye line stubbornly fixed on the ground.

The door nips shut quietly in the Sister's wake, a small blessing.

Flint breathes out heavy. A hand shifts to the back of the pew in front of them as if he means to stand, but instead just braces himself there so he might turn slightly further in her direction. "The shock will pass." Inevitably. "We should try to be ahead of it," is not unkind; he sounds worn by the prospect.

[hassaran]

Yseult feels some dull bristling at the implication that she is suffering from shock. It's been, what—two days? three? Difficult to measure when she hasn't slept beyond dozing in the saddle a few minutes at a stretch. Difficult to care, when it feels like any other amount of time would sound just as plausible. It's been an hour? It's been a month? Sure. Ten minutes, the rest of her life.

She opens her hands where they've been pressed together and rubs at her face, pressure that smears the residue of sweat and grime toward her hairline and then again, briskly. Alright. Sure. This is what she's still here for.

"What do you have in mind?"

[katabasis]

He has seen her a similar kind of tired before—this knifed in, marrow deep quality of weariness. It prickles at the back of the neck, discomforting in the sense that this combination of things elicits a twinging sense memory of helplessness that is only half due to having been on the receiving end of terrible news and the interminable wait which had dogged it.

"Driving them," he says. "What hands remain. Which I doubt will be difficult given the numbers and the work, but we should be mindful that what we burden them with keeps them close. I would rather we not have anyone too far afield when reality sets in, lest they decide to go wandering."

Were they sailors, he would see the entire company crammed onto the nearest ship and set out from the harbor directly.

[hassaran]

She nods. Easy enough to see the logic in it. "Paperwork alone won't keep them. We'll need to find some way to let them feel they're striking a blow back." The question of how they're going to do that now with even fewer hands than before feels like a yoke set across the back of her neck, or maybe new weights hung from the one that was already there.

"Something drastic in Minrathous? Poison their force in Starkhaven?" Her delivery is so flat it's difficult to tell if these are meant as serious suggestions except that she doesn't follow them up with anything else.

[katabasis]

His low hum sounds like agreement if not necessarily endorsement of something drastic in Minrathous, or poisoning wells. She's right. They'll need a short leash in the one hand and a sharp knife to cut a path forward in the other.

"There's news out of Estwatch," he says, because he has the note in his coat pocket and can force the two to connect. "They've had similar troubles with red lyrium as Ostwick. We might consider taking a contingent there and seeing who can be swayed to reinforce our numbers. With the right ships, we could cut up the Minanter to make a bid at driving Tevinter's influence back behind Starkhaven's walls."

[hassaran]

Red lyrium. Ostwick. Starkhaven. Estwatch. Yseult presses fingertips into the ridge of her brow, the base of her nose, and lets those ideas wash through her, simultaneously too large and too small to grasp. She's reminded of training decades ago to work through drink, or drugging, or sleep deprivation, trying to make sense of a simple code when she couldn't even keep three numbers in order, trying to pick a lock when her hands no longer felt part of her body. An impossible distance yawning between her and the world, receding further as she stretched. She takes a deep breath, feels the burn in healing ribs and drops her hands, turns her head to fix her focus on Flint.

"Do you think any of us will make a compelling case for recruitment?" is rhetorical. They can be a tough sell on their best day. "A victory, first. Even small, but something to build on. Then. Do you know anyone in Estwatch?"

sorry for this boring short tag blows dust off my brain

[katabasis]

"Not well," he says, which is true. "But what I do know could see a party safely to the island."

In the moment, he sounds confident enough about this for it to be a matter of facts rather than of delicate semantics. As for the rest—

"A case can be made."